How could we extract xenon from asteroids and comets?

Question

Xenon is a propellant for next which is a very good thruster. VASIMIR, which uses much more abundant hydrogen is under development and may not ready by the time we run out of resources. So, how could we produce xenon from which type asteroids and how?

Answer 1

There are several problems here.

First, Xenon is a noble gas and generally unreactive, so is not found chemically bonded in minerals or other compounds. Second, Xenon is a gas under most conditions you're likely to find it in the solar system, and thus will not be concentrated or harvestable in any large mass.

So harvesting a very rare gas from asteroids is pretty much not happening. If we want it elsewhere we will need to harvest it from atmospheric gases. But, since it is rare it will require filtering a lot of gas to acquire, making it uneconomical in small gas extraction quantities.

On the plus side, there really isn't a loss of xenon on Earth, it's denser than normal air and isn't disappearing from the atmosphere (other than use on space thrusters). It just makes up such a small fraction of the atmosphere that it takes a lot of processed air to harvest any xenon, it's produced as a byproduct of atmospheric gas harvesting and thus the amount produced is really fixed by total processing and is unlikely to increase just to meet demand for xenon without huge infrastructure costs.